A novel simulation framework is described that uses a client-server paradigm combined with a discrete event simulator to allow the simulation modules to be distributed around a centralized core. The framework also simplifies the creation of new simulations by achieving the goals of being general purpose, easily extensible, modular, and distributed. A prototype of the Client-Server Discrete Event Simulator (CS-DEVS) has been developed as a proof of concept. Two examples are presented to demonstrate the power of the new paradigm and prove the correctness of CS-DEVS. The first example is a modeling of the classical bank queuing simulation. The second example models the simulation of a distributed computing system, with complete modules for workload generation, architecture description, and scheduling and load balancing algorithms.